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Chain types matter more than most shoppers expect, because the link pattern decides whether a necklace holds a pendant well, survives daily wear, or kinks the first week you own it. Cable, curb, rope, box, and Figaro are the workhorses, with snake and herringbone for a sleeker look. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, we repair broken chains in-house every week, so we see firsthand which styles last and which ones come back. Here is a plain rundown of each. The five everyday workhorses Cable is the classic. Simple oval links connected in a row, each one set at a...

Alexandrite jewellery is built around one quiet bit of magic: a stone that shifts from green in daylight to a soft red or purple under a lamp. It is the rare colour-change variety of the mineral chrysoberyl, and it sits among the most sought-after coloured gems in the trade. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, alexandrite comes up most often with June babies and with collectors who want something that does not look like everyone else's ring. Here is how to understand it and how to buy it well. The colour change, and why it happens The headline feature is...

If you have ever wondered why two diamonds of the same carat look different sizes, the short answer is that carat measures weight, not width. A carat is one fifth of a gram. It tells you how heavy the stone is, and nothing about how big it looks once it sits on a finger. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, this is one of the most common surprises we walk customers through: two stones can both say "1.00 ct" on the report and still look noticeably different across the top. Carat is weight. Size is what you actually see. The...

Why are diamonds so expensive? Three things mostly: the cost of getting them out of the ground, a quality grading system called the 4Cs that prices each stone, and one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history that taught the world a diamond was the only acceptable engagement stone. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, customers ask us this almost weekly, and the honest answer mixes real scarcity with manufactured demand. Diamonds cost what they cost partly because they are hard to mine and partly because we were all told for eighty years that they should. The 4Cs set...

A coloured gemstone engagement ring, set with an emerald, ruby, or sapphire, is a strong choice for anyone who wants something other than a diamond, but the three stones are not equally suited to daily wear. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, the first thing we talk through with a customer eyeing a coloured stone is hardness, because an engagement ring takes more knocks than any other piece of jewellery a person owns. Sapphire and ruby shrug those knocks off. Emerald needs more care. We have written about sapphire on its own before, so here we will dig into ruby...

Recycled gold and ethical jewellery are two of the most used and least explained terms on a jewellery website, so let me cut through it: recycled gold is gold refined from old jewellery and scrap back to pure metal, and once refined it is chemically identical to newly mined gold. At Vanhess Jewellery in Coquitlam, BC, we remount heirlooms and work with recycled metal, so these labels are not abstractions to us. Here is what each one actually means, and which parts are marketing. What recycled gold really is Gold does not wear out. A wedding band from 1955, dental...